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Face it Tiger: You’re Still Reading the Same Stuff (and enjoying it)

I’ve been a Spider-Gwen fan ever since Edge of Spider-Verse.
For those unfamiliar, Spider-Gwen is an alternative universe Marvel comic book,
in which Gwen Stacey (typically a love interest for Peter Parker) is bitten by
the radioactive Spider. Gwen, becomes that universe’s Spider-Man (or
Spider-Woman as the case is), while Peter Parker dies tragically – fulfilling Uncle
Ben’s narrative role. In this universe, everything is trendy to the point of
being ironic and pretentious. CD’s never replaced vinyl, soft drinks use real
sugar, Donald Trump is M.O.D.O.K. (or M.O.D.A.A.K. in this universe - Mental
Organism Designed As America's King), the Unicorn is a Brony, the Green Goblin was
Harry Osborn’s D&D character, Daredevil is the Kingpin of Crime and on it
goes, countless reordering’s of existing continent to achieve the simulacrum of
new – or at least distinct – material.

The universe of Gwen Stacey as Spider-Woman seemed to have a
freshness to it that other alternate takes on Spider-Man didn’t seem to hold.
Don’t get me wrong, Gerard Way’s Peni
Parker was brilliant and interesting to read. But the Gwen Stacey storyline
seemed to achieve a certain balance of familiar, Spider-Man action, with a
fresh take on the existing character. And so I kept reading, first through
Spider-Verse and then the limited series and finally, here I am with issue twenty-eight
sitting on my desk – following Gwen’s adventures through her battles with familiar-yet-unfamiliar
villains such as Rhino and Lizard along with reimaginings of classic Spider-Man
storylines like that of the Black Costume saga – titled the eye-roll worthy “Gwenom”
story arch in the pages of Spider-Gwen. The point is, I guess, that I am not really
reading something new. Rather, I’m reading the same stories and characters that
I enjoyed as a teenager, back when Ben Reilly was Spider-Man (I never really
had the opportunity to read much “Peter Parker”, by the time I started reading Marvel
the Clone Saga was well underway and I’d only just started picking up
Spider-Man when the titles switch to Scarlett Spider). It’s the same kind of anti-reboot-reboot,
a restart without negating the existing continuity that we see every time a new
origin movie comes out, along with other shifts to alternate characters occupying
the same persona – like the Ultimate Comics Miles Morales as Spider-Man (now
wrapped back into the mainstream continuity) or Miguel O’Hara as Spider-Man
2099.

So, what makes reading
these same characters and story-lines, already detailed in decades of Spider-Man
comics, pleasurable when put forward in a different form with Spider-Gwen? On
one hand, I’m older now… so my tastes have matured and are different to what
they were back then. Sure, I still enjoy the same concepts and ideas. That is
why I’ve been reading superhero comics for decades. But the means of expression
that I enjoy now aren’t the same as back then. As a teenager I didn’t really
pay attention to the art style or how many words were crammed into a speech bubble
– so long as, on a casual flick through the comic, I could see blood, big muscles,
big boobs and big fights. These days, I want nuance and narrative. I want a
balanced words-per-speech-bubble count. The kind I see in Jonathan Hickman’s
East Of West or Grant Morrison’s Multiversity. Art these days also needs to be
expressive and evocative of the narrative for me, the way the black-and-white pallet
works for the Walking Dead. It has to carry at least 50% of the story.

Spider-Gwen hits
that mark for me. The art is somewhere between expressionism and
punk-rock-sketch-book. And the word count isn’t excessive. In that sense, with
Spider-Gwen, I have the opportunity to revisit the old storylines and their
concepts that I enjoyed without having to revisit those elements of that I’ve
now grown out of.

Face it Tiger: You’re Still Reading the Same Stuff (and enjoying it)
Reviewed by Nicholas William Moll
on
Tuesday, February 06, 2018
Rating: 5